1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the field of management of sequential media, and more particularly, to reclamation processing of sequential media such as tapes, in which management is performed by a storage management application.
2. Description of the Related Art
Storage management applications perform different data storage operations such as backup, archiving and hierarchical storage management. Storage management applications use sequential media such as tape for cost efficient storage mainly for data which is access less often and which is retained for longer periods of time.
A typical example for sequential media is a tape cartridge, also called tape. A tape cannot be written in a random fashion but rather sequentially from the beginning to the end. Thus it is not possible to write data to any position on tape but only at the position where the last write operation ended. When data on a tape needs to be overwritten then the tape must be written from the beginning. Thus tapes are written sequentially. Over time data that has been written to tape expires, which causes data to become inactive. Typically not all data on tape expires at one time, and remaining data stays active.